TikTok is going all out to resist a proposed sell-off bill in the U.S. that will force its owner ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S.-based company due to national security concerns.
In the latest effort, TikTok rolled out a new $2.1 million ad campaign to create awareness about the benefits that TikTok provides for users in the United States.
The campaign will air on T.V. in the U.S. Its communications outreach will focus on those battleground states where the fight is the toughest in this election.
According to CNBC:

"The company has purchased television ad time in the battleground states of Nevada, Montana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to data from AdImpact. All five states are represented by endangered Senate Democrats, each of whom is up for another six-year term."

The thinking is that this will add more stress to these senators to fight the TikTok bill, which builds off of TikTok's larger push to bring attention to the value the app can add for U.S. businesses.
Though the foundation of these spots are false in the sense that they inflate the claim that TikTok would be banned as a result of the under consideration bill .
Not that the bill says.

The proposal would require TikTok to accept U.S. ownership to alleviate concerns over potential influence by foreign adversaries over public opinion in the United States. Tensions between the United States and China are now rising on multiple fronts, with paramount concern that information transmitted through TikTok likely would have been used as propaganda to influence American voters, based on the history of Chinese influence operations more broadly, and on direct links between the app and C.C.P.

In China, ByteDance works closely with the Chinese Government on content controls and regulations. Of course, those controls do not apply to TikTok, which only operates outside of China itself. But again, the history of Chinese influence operations in other nations does suggest that TikTok could be a target for the same.

It taked down over 50,000 instances of an influence program operated by China, known as "Dragonbridge," across YouTube, Blogger, and AdSense during the same year. Similarly, Meta has identified hundreds of instances of Chinese influence operations, and the company removed nearly 5,000 Facebook profiles affiliated with one such program in Q3 alone last year.

With all this in place, it's not difficult to consider a Chinese-owned app as merely another vector of the same thing, but prior reports have also suggested that Chinese officials have at least tried to influence trends on TikTok so they say nothing but positive things about CCP policies.

Hundreds of current employees at both ByteDance and TikTok have previously worked for Chinese state media, according to investigations.

With the list of considerations, it indeed seems there is a case for further consideration of a TikTok sell-off push and, once again, the U.S. Government clashes with China over the war in Ukraine, control of the South China Sea, Taiwan, etc.

Various reasons may stand behind the new push for the sell-off, what is being pushed by cybersecurity experts. Again, this is not a ban as TikTok suggests; it is a sell-off based on such concerns.

Although the C.C.P. has apparently indicated that it won't stand for a forced sell-off in either direction anyway, which might also mean an all-out ban. But that's not what the real proposal says, and TikTok's persistent but false statements on this front have apparently gotten under the skin of some senators, too.

Still, it appears that TikTok is very much keen on this being the only future where the opposition of the bill seems plausible. However, to oppose a bill by using your assumed influence to make your opposition drive may not help the app either.

Time will pass, and maybe even months, before the bill reaches the next level, and rest assured that TikTok will do everything possible to keep this ownership structure in place.